Growing industry support for CFX Initiative

The Connected Factory Initiative is growing rapidly with nearly 90 members currently participating in the committee. There are six software vendors, 12 tier one EMS and OEM manufacturers, and 37 machine and device vendors. Device vendor involvement extends the reach of CFX even into the barcode scanners, materials handling equipment, and sensors within the factory.

Together, with such strong involvement and collaboration of the industry, and support of IPC, the committee’s work is leading to the creation of a modern; IoT based method for creating factory data exchange in an elegant, cost effective, open, and free manner.

“Great collaboration and support from various entities to drive CFX, and the progress made at IPC APEX EXPO 2017 is going to be one giant leap in the march towards Industry 4.0 for the PCBA/Electronics Product ecosystem,” said Subcommittee co-chair Mahi Duggirala, Director, Enterprise Solutions, flex. This collaboration is yielding great results. At IPC APEX EXPO 2017, the committee demonstrated its strong belief that consensus and technical perspective sharing among a full cross section of the industry is critical to future adoption and success of CFX.  Despite a successful vote on the transport technology or CFX, a task group was reopened to deepen the technical analysis. Thus, the final transport is within a week of adoption.

An additional task group has begun work on the unprecedented CFX data model, accepted as the approach to be taken with near unanimity at IPC APEX EXPO. This is being called the ‘Lego Brick’ approach because it models the data emerging from a type of device or machine or system not in the machine-type monolithic manner of the past, but as a collection of structured ‘capabilities’ that are joined together to establish a full and yet extensible definition for an entire system or machine---even ones that are completely custom machines and machines that are ‘hybrid’ in nature such as printers with inspection systems within them.

Such a data model is expected to speed implementation for the machine vendors, and ensure CFX proliferation into devices and machines that are not even yet on the drawing board of R&D labs.